


Painted from Memory

by thebabytiger



Category: Defiance (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-30
Updated: 2014-12-30
Packaged: 2018-03-04 06:56:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2956580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thebabytiger/pseuds/thebabytiger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stahma Tarr muses on the difference between Castithan grayscale and the riot of Earth's colors.</p><p>Title stolen from the season 2 episode of the same name, where Kenya returns to Defiance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Painted from Memory

Stahma Tarr’s world has always been stark white. She cannot remember anything else, not even back on Casti, not when she had been shoving her fiancé-to-be out an airlock and escaping onto a ship bound for a new world. Not when she had been in stasis.

Coming to earth had been an entirely different experience. Even after terraforming, the planet was ugly. Browns and blacks and grays and greens abounded, as full of imperfections, flaws, and dirt as anything could be. Stahma remembered that she had thought they had landed in hell, that Rayetso was punishing her for what she had done to get herself and Datak on that ship, and her eyes simply ache as she tries to take in her surroundings without having to actually look at the monstrosity that is the planet they have come to inhabit. But it’s not the way for a Castithan woman to lament over what could be, and so they do their best to make the best of it. They learn to look at the world around them and not see the flaws of the dirt and mud, and they learn to see in grayscale, to take bits and pieces of the world around them and restore them to the pure beauty that is an imitation of their home world. Stahma, and the others, had not thought to miss home, but in those first years, in those first decades, she absolutely hates where they have landed. She hates that every step outside her own front door feels like an attack, and she hates the way that the dirt clings to the bottom of her dress, pervasive and persistent, long after she has come back indoors. No simple cleansing can remove the memory of the taint from her mind.

Alak is lucky. He knows nothing else but this dirty, jarring, terrible world, and he revels in it. He thinks nothing of the odd disparity between the world within the walls of his home and the world outside those same walls, and he thinks nothing for the ease with which he can swap and switch between them. At times, Stahma hates her son for how well-adjusted he has become. For all she has come to like Defiance, to like the town they have managed to build despite the humans that also inhabit it, she knows that she will never consider something quite so human, quite so earthly, to be truly home. She knows that she is among the few who are actually learning to thrive in this world, who are slowly but surely learning not to flinch, even on the inside, when they step outside. She knows that Datak will never join her in that, but also that he has learned to enjoy the other aspects of humanity. Her husband has learned to enjoy the greed of humanity, and has coupled his violence and ambition to eke out a place for himself at the top of the hierarchy. He will never tolerate the browns and greens of earth, but he has learned to love the red of blood and the pink of a human whore’s skin. In that, the Tarrs are utter opposites. By the time Alak is grown, the only color neither of them can abide, not even partially, is the blue of their son’s hair.

Sometimes Stahma looks up at the sky and sees that blue. It will never be her favorite color, muted as it is, and she resents its presence. That blue is the blue of progress, of a new generation, and it’s the type of blue that will come and swallow her whole if she isn’t careful. It’s the type of endless blue that Stahma fears like she’s never feared any other color before, and she still fears quite a few.

It’s blue like Kenya Rosewater’s eyes. Stahma so wants to hate her, as she has come to understand all of the other wives do. It seems to be tradition in this town to resent the symptom, rather than the cause, and she knows that Kenya gets more than her fair share of abuse from those who have come to find the young human more worthy of the abuse that won’t stop rattling around in their chests. It’s more than a little distressing, then, to find that she can’t hate Kenya Rosewater, especially not when the other woman is so damned nice about everything. Despite the fact that there is this huge secret between them, though they both know about it and it is in a way everything but a secret, Stahma never feels as if it is done out of malic. Datak, she is forced to conclude, is to blame in all of this and Kenya is just a tool of his to use to bring this shame to their marriage. Not that she would ever say his actions shamed her, of course, because she is too high to admit to such a thing. It is not the Castithan way, to admit to such things, and these sorts of indiscretions are, among other things, what mark the customs of male privilege in their culture. It is not his indiscretion that shames her, but rather the fact that it is with a human. That with a human, Datak can find something that Stahma cannot provide. And perhaps it is this burning curiosity, coupled with Kenya’s unfailing niceties, that leads Stahma to actually begin to like Kenya Rosewater, to actually want to spend time with the woman, to talk to her, if not quite like a friend, then like someone who is friendly. She does not want to judge the woman for how she chooses to make a living, and she does not want to judge her the way the other wives do.

She does, kind of, wish that Datak would stop sleeping with her, but she knows there is little chance of that happening. And she comes to find that she wishes less and less for this, as she has come to enjoy her time spent with Kenya giggling, though dignified Castithan women of her liro don’t giggle over anything, over Datak, over this thing that bonds them together and how strange it is, but often they giggle over other things. They have deep discussions, and Stahma learns that Kenya is intelligent and witty and insightful and that it takes the top of Stahma’s game to keep things from the brunette. They discuss almost everything under the sun; it is no secret that Datak wants control of the city and it is even less a secret that Kenya’s sister Amanda happens to possess it. Stahma knows that while Kenya supports her sister, loves her even, that Kenya is just as trapped into the life of having to answer to a politician as Stahma herself is, though her bonds reach beyond that of a human world.

When Alak makes it clear what his intentions with Christie are, Stahma is unpleasantly surprised to find that she is woefully unprepared to have a human in the house, to have a human in their lives, and that the time she has spent learning the nuances of Kenya Rosewater has not, in actuality, helped her understand humans and their customs. She learns then, as she should have noticed before, that Kenya is the most popular kind of outsider in the human world; that Kenya knows almost everything but is not wholly indicative of a society which has relegated her to the sidelines and the shadows. That she has not noticed is a testament to Kenya’s fortitude, as she has made a throne out of those sidelines and shadows, has made herself a Queen in a city without royalty, and has made herself intrinsic to the community in their small little frontier town in a way that even her sister, with all her supposed political acumen, would be hard pressed to accomplish. Even still, when Stahma has questions she cannot imagine going anywhere else but to Kenya.

The razor rain storm has an odd effect on the conversation that night. It’s as if the sharp edges have managed to cut them off from anything and everything but each other, leaving the Need/Want to shelter them from the mess and tangle and bloodshed that waits for them outside its doors in more than just a literal sense. For the first time, there is no Datak and there is hardly any mention of Alak and it’s just Stahma and Kenya talking about each other. And when Kenya asks her to dance, Stahma comes to the startling realization that she wants to learn everything that Kenya has to teach her, that this woman who has made herself a queen is hers for the night and she should take advantage of a moment where it is just them and there are no other worries.

Kenya is a splash of color against a pristine but dreary world and Stahma cannot get enough of trying to learn every single hue and tint to this amazing woman. For all that Datak has come to love blood and human skin, and Alak has learned to love the limitless sky, Stahma finds that she wants to learn the colors of Kenya. So she does her best to absorb everything, from the purple of Kenya’s favorite robe, and all of the browns and grays of human hair and skin, to even the smallest slashes of crimson fight and fire and the always endless blue that tells Stahma that coming to know Kenya Rosewater will change everything.

Kenya paints the world around her in colors as vibrant as she is and for once the colors don’t hurt Stahma’s eyes to see. For once, she can step out her front door without wincing, and for once she can realize that the color of the human world is not an abomination. She comes to appreciate color in a way that not even her son, for all she had been jealous of him before, has the ability to do, for he has never known the absolute white of a Castithan world without also knowing the passionate riot of color on Earth and he does not know how much of a marvel it is to be able to turn something so hideous into something so beautiful with just a single thought. Perhaps it is that which has her warming to Christie, that has her fighting Datak for her son’s happiness, but primarily for the inclusion of humanity into a cool and clinical world where even passion is muted into Castithan white.

The Need/Want becomes an unexpected home, a riot of people and colors that she never could have dreamed she would be comfortable in, but Stahma finds that she has no reason to fear color within those walls. It’s a place of learning, of letting go of past perceptions, and Stama becomes more comfortable in that world, in a world where everything is so very unabashedly itself, than she is in her own home. Four white walls filled with white people and white tile floors and white decorations are stifling. By the time things with Kenya start to go south, and Datak begins to suspect and tries to force his punishment on her, Stahma is already no stranger to the gripping panic that comes with being trapped and suffocated.

She’s not kidding when she says that she’d like to escape with Kenya, as the whole of the situation has become almost more than she can bear and she can’t imagine having to stay in a home that actively works to suppress her by its mere existence. She doesn’t count on losing her nerve in the woods though – Kenya is all at once more furious, more passionate, and more deadly than she had bargained on and the russet fall colors of the leaves remind her of Datak and she feels the pressure come to a single instant of hyper-awareness and she realizes that her chance has already passed her by. She does not think, in that moment, that she can save herself from Kenya without doing irreparable harm, but she does not think, in that moment, that she has another choice. The flask had been a souvenir of Datak, had been her way of showing him she was going to be compliant, and she hadn’t been planning on using it, but backed into a corner she finds herself offering the other woman a drink from it and the instant Kenya catches the cool metal Stahma can feel the world sliding back into bland white once again.

She spends the entirety of Datak’s incarceration trying to put the color back into her world, but try as she might, no amount of money, blood, tears, and alcohol can manage to put back even the most muted color in the world. Amanda Rosewater, Stahma discovers, does not have her sister’s talents for pretty much everything, and the blonde is a pale substitution for the vivacious and sultry Kenya. The Need/Want may be still standing, may be even continuing to thrive, but the atmosphere is not the same, and no amount of pretending can make Stahma think that it is. Even still, she finds herself drawn to Amanda like a moth to a flame, as if spending enough time with the former Mayor can give her the tiniest glimpse of Kenya even though she knows that’s not true.

When Kenya finally does return to the Need/Want, Stahma is sure that it’s a hallucination even as the whole bar floods with colors so bright and beautiful that they’re physically painful. She can do nothing else but flee, wondering at how cruel the mind can be to give her only the illusion of what she has most wanted for several months and make it seem so real. The pain of that is perhaps even worse than the blinding effect that she feels in her very soul. She stumbles her way home, trying to soothe herself with the purity of white walls, and it works for a time until she finds herself in a market blooming with color, stalking Kenya through sunflowers like a criminal and doing her very best to remember every single painful burst of color in preparation for the day that Kenya Rosewater will invariably leave her stranded once more in a colorless world. It's not something that Stahma Tarr could have ever predicted she would mind, or even fear, and it is in that moment, nearly swallowed alive by the fiery yellows of flowers around her that bloom as fiercly as the sun above, that she begins to feel her grasp on the ever-present line that she has been walking all her life slip from beneath her.

When she finally falls, she falls into the endless blue of Kenya's eyes, and finds that she can't imagine being able to even remember a world not filled to brimming with the colors of Kenya.


End file.
